The Simpsons predicted it?

Scene · reconstructed from the paperworkPicture it. 19 March 2000. An episode of The Simpsons called "Bart to the Future" goes out. It is set in a future Washington, and in it President Lisa Simpson tells the country she has inherited a budget crunch from "President Trump"[time-2016].

That is the moment this whole file hangs on, and it is real. The line is in the episode. Nobody disputes it, including the man who wrote it.

Sixteen years later, in March 2016, TIME reported writer Dan Greaney's account of where the joke came from. According to that report, it was not a forecast. Greaney's words: It was pitched because it was consistent with the vision of America going insane[time-2016]. The gag was the bottom Lisa inherits, a warning dressed as a punchline.

I want to keep that scene clean, because what follows is mostly not scenes. It is screenshots. A frame is lifted from one episode, something is pasted in, a flag, a date, a casket, and it travels without the episode attached. The file is full of those, and most of them did not air the way they are shared.

So the night of this case is really two things under one label: one genuine line from 2000, and a long run of images that only look like it.

The paper trail is mostly fact-checkers going back to the tape.

The record here was built by people who did something simple: they found the original episodes and compared.

The first wave came in March 2020. Images said to show the season 4 episode "Marge in Chains", which aired on 6 May 1993[wikipedia-marge-in-chains], "predicting" the coronavirus spread online. HuffPost reported former showrunner Bill Oakley saying some of the shared images were manipulated[huffpost-2020], that the "Osaka Flu" joke was coincidence because history repeats, and that he objected to the misuse: I don't like it being used for nefarious purposes[huffpost-2020].

In March 2022 PolitiFact took apart a collage claiming the show had predicted Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It traced each image: Putin added from a 2016 clip, a Ukrainian flag pasted over a US flag in a season 17 frame[politifact-2022], a projectile from a 2016 game. Its conclusion: the images from "The Simpsons" that supposedly allude to the war were doctored[politifact-2022]. Rated False.

In August 2022 USA TODAY checked a "monkeypox" image of Homer with a rash and a monkey. It was two episodes glued together: chickenpox from 2005 and a helper monkey from 1998[usatoday-2022]. Neither mentions monkeypox.

In July 2024, after the shooting at a Trump rally, an image of Trump in a casket circulated as another "prediction". USA TODAY found it never appeared on the show and had circulated since at least 2017[usatoday-2024]; the lectern image beside it came from a 2015 short. It quoted showrunner Matt Selman calling such images doctored fakes created after the fact for the purpose of misleading people[usatoday-2024].

Alongside the fact-checks sits the writers' own account. Al Jean told the Irish Times in 2018 that episodes air about a year after they are written, so the writers think a year ahead, and joked: I predict people will make too much of our great predictions[irishtimes-2018]. In 2021 he told NME: If you throw enough darts, you're going to get some bullseyes[nme-2021].

The trail, then, splits cleanly in two. The fakes and the real lines.

The turn in this story is separating those two piles and looking at what is left.

The fakes go first, because they are the easiest. The fact-checks show the Ukraine collage was doctored[politifact-2022], the casket image never aired[usatoday-2024], and the monkeypox image was built from two unrelated episodes[usatoday-2022]. Those are not predictions that turned out wrong. They are not predictions at all.

What remains are real lines that land near real events. Here the fair other side deserves its full weight. The headline case is genuine. A network cartoon put "President Trump"[time-2016] into a script in March 2000, long before his presidency, and the writer does not deny it. He only denies that it was foresight. If one line can be that close, believers ask, why dismiss the rest out of hand?

The answer the record gives is volume. Jean's version is the darts: throw enough and you get some bullseyes[nme-2021]. Statisticians Diaconis and Mosteller put it more formally: the law of truly large numbers, and the habit of forgetting misses. Forgetting many failed predictions makes success seem more surprising[diaconis-1989]. A show with hundreds of episodes and thousands of jokes, written a year ahead, thinking a year ahead[irishtimes-2018], will hit something. Nobody keeps a list of the jokes that missed.

The file's Finding is Explained. The real hits have writers who explain them, the viral ones are mostly fakes, and no source shows anyone at the show knew anything in advance.

There are still a couple of loose threads, and they are about the fakes, not the show.

What the record does not settle here is small, and mostly about who did what to which frame.

• Who made the casket image. USA TODAY traces it back to at least 2017[usatoday-2024]. Its maker is not identified. The fact-checks show what was altered, not by whom.
• How many viral "predictions" are genuine frames. The file found no systematic count. Each claim has been checked one at a time, as with Ukraine[politifact-2022] and monkeypox[usatoday-2022].
• Air-date details. The "Marge in Chains" date comes from an encyclopedia page[wikipedia-marge-in-chains], not a primary Fox source.
• The original interviews. Greaney's explanation is read through TIME's report[time-2016] and Oakley's through HuffPost's[huffpost-2020]; both point back to Hollywood Reporter interviews the file could not open.

And what the record does not prove. It does not show that every claimed prediction is fake; some lines are real and some coincidences are striking. It does not show that anyone planned events. Both of those stay exactly where the sources leave them.

The comparison table, the documents and the timeline are below. Start with the one line that is real.